Psifr: Analysis and visualization of free recall data
Neal W Morton · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2020
Research on human memory has been strongly influenced by data from free recall experiments, wherein participants study a list of items (such as words) and then freely recall them in any order they wish (Murdock, 1962).Free recall provides an extremely rich dataset that not only reflects which items were recalled but also the order in which they were recalled.However, analysis of free recall data is difficult, as many different influences on recall must be taken into account.For example, one influential analysis, conditional response probability as a function of lag (lag-CRP), has been used to measure the tendency of participants to successively recall items that were originally presented near to each other in time (Kahana, 1996).This analysis requires taking into account the items that are still available for recall at each transition between recalled items.This analysis may need to be made conditional on other factors, such as the category of the items being recalled (Morton & Polyn, 2017;Polyn, Erlikhman, & Kahana, 2011), thus complicating the analysis further.